The title of this post is the punchline to an old, old story about the limits of advertising; a story which may or may not be based on fact. The story goes that a big food-manufacturing conglomerate came up with a brand new formulation for dog food, and advertised it with a huge, costly campaign: print ads, TV commercials, product placement in movies, TV shows, county fairs, giveaways and sponsorships; the whole ball of wax … and the product cratered. The CEO of the company is irate and demands answers from anyone who can give him a reason why. Didn’t they do everything possible to make their dog food brand the market leader? Image everyone at that meeting looking nervously at each other at this point – because they have done everything possible … except for one small thing. Finally, someone gets up sufficient nerve to answer. “But the dogs don’t like it.†More »
So it seems like the ‘screaming children snatched away at the border by the heartless minions of the Trumpenfuhrer’ narrative of last week is kind of collapsing in one direction – because just about all the most egregious examples of minor children being separated from the adults accompanying them in their illegal passage across a national boundary and subsequently held in durance vile, date from the previous administration … and secondly, because the usual screaming hair-on-fire activists are using the matter as an excuse to harass and threaten members of Trump’s cabinet, Republican holders of public offices, employees of national law enforcement agencies such as ICE, and conservatives generally. So the Social Justice Warriors, who never rest nor sleep have opened another front, it appears – a front of ostracism and harassment, most plainly led by the intellectual shining jewel of the Congressional Black Caucus, Generalissimo “Mad Maxine†Walters. Mad Maxine, (possibly the homeliest woman in national public life today), has enthusiastically urged her followers to hound conservatives (not all of whom are Republicans, let me note) from all public venues; restaurants, gas stations, movie theaters, grocery stores and the like. Apparently, to Mad Maxine, such as we are not worthy, and pollute the righteous by our very presence. Enough members of the public appear to agree with her and have joined in enthusiastically in this enterprise. Gee, I wonder if we should now ask for separate facilities. You know – conservative-only drinking fountains, bathrooms and movie theaters. Maybe conservatives ought to be forced to wear armbands with a brightly-colored and distinctive shape on it, and live in specific neighborhoods, as well. Somehow, I think Mad Maxine would be perfectly OK with that.
Even more alarming than the harassing of certain members of Trump’s cabinet or prominent and recognizable associates at their homes and places of business, are the threats against and harassment of law enforcement personnel employed by ICE as well as other agencies – to include threats against families. There have also been threats against the operators of a non-profit network of shelters in Texas where many of the illegal alien minor children are being housed; employees of the shelters have had their license plates photographed at work and reported being called and threatened at their homes.
This kind of harassment, if continued and intensified – which seems to be a given – is absolutely not guaranteed to end well. We already have had the example of Congressman Steve Scalise and members of the Republican congressional baseball team being deliberately gunned down by one James Hodgkinson, a Bernie Saunders partisan and apparently motivated by more than the usual amount of partisan anger. In 2012, one Floyd Lee Corkins II brought a gun and a bag of Chic-fil-A sandwiches to the headquarters of the Family Research Council with the object to shooting as many employees as possible and rubbing the sandwiches in the faces of the dying. His motivation for mass murder appears to be tangle of resentment over the FRC’s support of traditional marriage, and severe butt-hurt over an otherwise innocuous fast-food sandwich chain not feeling any particular pain over their owner’s support of the same. Rather obviously, young Mr. Corkins was not wrapped all that tightly. Still, he conceived a plan to mass-murder, and but for his own ineptitude and the courage of the FRC’s security guard, would have carried it out. The shooter at the Capitol Gazette yesterday turns out to be an obsessive freak of a related kind, motivated by personal animus against the newspaper itself, which is what I thought upon first hearing news about the shooting – that or a very bitter ex of a newspaper employee.)
I’d venture a guess that among the not-tightly-wrapped, the mis-educated, resentful and longing-to-belong-to-the-heroic-Trump-Resistance-eleventy!!! – there are many more Floyd Corkins. They wait their opportunity for action in the manner in which the voices in their heads urge, and the various deranged media voices suggest. Some – indeed, I fear that many of these not-to-tightly-wrapped – will act in the coming months, either in public in a black mask and armed with a bike lock, a club, a Molotov cocktail, an amateur-constructed but brutally-effective bomb, or a gun. And when that happens … it will be what some among the conservative side have taken to calling a Rubicon moment.
When that Rubicon event happens, I wonder if the establishment national media will take any responsibility for having set the whole bloody pageant in motion; I think not. In their way, they have been playing their part in whipping up the mob outrage – in part to assuage their own outrage that Trump and not Hillary is president, and because they want, more than anything else, to be the one blaring the blood-soaked headlines. Outrage is what the national media loves, dirty laundry is what they live for. “You know the boys in the newsroom, Got a running bet, Get the widow on the set, We need dirty laundry.†A larger and larger segment of the news-consuming public has become wise to this and correspondingly resentful; witness how CNN’s obnoxious Jim Acosta was heckled by attendees at a recent Trump rally. Comment and discuss, as you will.
By the Mystic Marbles of Matagorda, I thought that last week’s bout of Trump derangement was the far frozen limit, but here it is only Wednesday and the establishment media is already running around in hair-on-fire fits of hysteria, the distributed radical insurgency known as Antifa has declared bloody war on the employees of the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, a writer employed by the New Yorker magazine as a fact-checker has singlehandedly undermined the intellectual coinage working for that magazine, having been a Fulbright scholar and a graduate of Harvard … and after a nearly fifty year hiatus from public consciousness, Peter Fonda has hove once again into sight. Like a groundhog, only hairier and on a longer rotation.
Being the cynical person that I have become over the last two administrations, I’d bet that something like Journolist is still in operation among those media reps still desirous of seeing conservatives in general and Donald Trump in particular driven from participation in the body politic. How else for the plight of the poor, pitiful illegal immigrant children to suddenly sprout in the headlines like some dreadful kind of kudzu between one day and the next? Especially since the … urm … custody situation has been a thing since the previous administration. Especially since the previous administration exacerbated the situation vis-à -vis minor children crossing the border illegally by seeming to suggest that having the kiddy-winks with you was a kind of get-out-of-detention-free card. Having the situation of minor children separated from adults who might be their parents, or a ‘coyote’ – a trafficker transporting them over an international border for shady purposes – after being detained upon illegally entering the United States is not something that just happened this week. No, this has been going on for a while, and of course it is just now being deliberately blown up. I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night. Discuss: what is this attempting to distract us from? Is it working so far, or is it blowing up like something from Acme in the hands of the hapless Coyote?
I freely confess to having initially thought that when Donald Trump threw his hat into the political ring and began campaigning for election to the highest office in our fair land – it was a colossal joke and not one in particularly good taste. But I was never an adamant never-Trumper, and eventually came to think that hey – a wheeler-dealer Noo Yawk property developer (who after all HAD run a good-sized business enterprise for years) couldn’t possibly stuff up the job any more disastrously than He Who Dances With Teleprompters and his merry band of faculty lounge theorizers, career bureaucrats and second-gen beneficiaries of elite parental, fraternal or marital connections. In any case – I’d vote for practically anyone than Her Inevitableness the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua, even if I had to pin my nostrils shut with C-clamp. So – what the hell. Reader, I voted for him. I have to admit that when it sends rabid lefty celebs like Robert De Niro into a spittle-flecked rant on live television, I am tempted to rub my hands together and cackle with evil glee like Mr. Burns in the Simpsons, watching them come unglued with their hate for flyover country and those denizens of it which also voted for him. A man is known in a large part by the character and quantity of his enemies; Trumps’ are as numerous and as varied as any collection of grotesqueries in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
So I started this post as yet another meditation on how ever-flipping-out-of-their minds the current iteration of Trump-haters are … and then the meeting in Singapore happened, and actually promises … maybe, if all goes well, a resolution to a war which started just before I was born, in a country to which my father was stationed as an Army draftee when I was born, in which I served for a year (three and a half decades later) and in which my daughter might very well have drawn duty in her turn. The Korean War – bloody and vicious, as we are reminded through M*A*S*H reruns – ended in an armistice and a heavily-armed border which slices the Korean peninsula into halves. Not anywhere equal halves, other than geographical.
Back at the start of it all, the northern part of that peninsula was the industrially-developed part. The inhabited part, whereas the southern bits were the rural and primitive parts. The whole of the place, as I came to understand in the year that I lived there, emerged as a feisty and independent kingdom, with a very distinct culture, identity, and language; a language with its’ own phonetic alphabet – the notion of one of their genius kings. Not Chinese, definitely not Japanese, in spite of seventy years of heavy-handed Japanese occupation, which only ended after WWII. I liked Korea enormously, for all that my taste of it was relatively brief. Seoul was a hectic, spectacular, modern city. I think that I went across it in every direction, via the subway, bus, or by taxi, innumerable times on my way to do an English-language voice-job, and never felt the least bit threatened or in danger because of being a foreigner. I was not much taller than the average Korean woman, or all that much more fair-skinned, and with my hair bundled up under a beret, not all that much darker of hair color. Unless people looked directly at me … I didn’t stand out all that much and I worked at not attracting attention to myself anyway. (But with one of my comrades in doing voice-work, who was about six and a half-foot tall … yeah, then we got noticed on public transportation.)
The Korean nationals that I worked with, on my various voice and broadcasting jobs were a relatively cosmopolitan lot, and we talked now and again about the North, and the threat intermittently posed, most notably to Seoul, well within artillery range of North Korean big guns. Indeed, about every six months or so, the Norks indulged in what another blogger termed the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken – a regularly-scheduled theatrical bit of sabre-rattling, to which the old Korea hands (and possibly most ordinary Koreans) eventually became pretty blasé. (More here from The Daily Brief) Is there now a possible end in sight to a situation which has existed slightly longer than I have been alive, through Donald Trump’s surprisingly cordial summit with Little Fat Kim? Speculation on the imminent collapse of the North floats around at about the same frequency as the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken. But this time, I do wonder if the Reign of Kim really is on very shaky ground – and Little Fat Kim knows it and is nervous about survival – his personal survival and that of his circle. Bits and dribbles of dismaying information keep trickling out of the hermetically-sealed kingdom; that the soldiers forage for food in the cultivated fields, that the Nork soldier who defected across the DMZ was riddled with intestinal parasites, that the underground nuclear test site collapsed the whole side of the mountain where it was located, that whole districts are stripped bare of vegetation … and perhaps at long last, the Chinese are not quite so blindly supportive of their favorite client state. Is North Korea circling the drain of history, and the Kim regime is trying one last desperate throw of the dice while North Korea still has the appearance of a viable state? Discuss.
Ah yes, a rousing round of storm and stress this week in our own very dear so-called entertainment media, starting with Rosanne Barr’s self-titled and relaunched sitcom being cancelled with such alacrity that security probably left scorch-marks on the carpet, escorting her off the premises at speed, although I am pretty sure that in Hollywierdland, it doesn’t work quite that way when terminating an unsatisfactory employee. Especially a star player in a recently-revived, highly-rated, and yet – controversial sit-com. Still – it is curious how quick off the mark the sacking was. So Rosanne has always been a bit of a loose cannon … no, reconsider that; a completely unsecured cannon, impulsively driven to fire in all directions on the slightest provocation, up to and acquiring her own foot as target. Calculated or inadvertent – at this point it makes no difference to anyone, really, save perhaps for her costars, now left high, dry and living on residuals.
In any case, I never watched the re-boot, and have only hazy memories of seeing the original show now and again. Meh. As far as a family-oriented sitcom set in blue-collar, flyover country America went, we much preferred The Middle, and Last Man Standing. If anything, the cast of characters, and the actors playing them seemed … well, nicer. More grounded, even.
But I cannot even work myself up into the required lather of fury over Ms. Barr’s allegedly uber-offensive tweet. Is Val-Jar truly a Muslim Brotherhood creature? Who knows for certain; likely those in the business of national security whose business it was to vet those appointed or hired to serve the highest offices in the land spent most of decade working very hard to not know any definitive answer to that question. Embarrassing to the Obama Administration, y’know. Best not to look too searchingly at Val-Jar’s connections and associations, such as they are. Does she strongly resemble the female character, Zira, from the first Planet of the Apes movie, and Ari, from the 2001 remake? Well … honesty compels an answer in the affirmative, mostly because of the hairstyle. Rude to make the comparison; yes, although such delicacy of feeling didn’t stop many with making the same unflattering comparison with regard to George W. Bush and driving in the point with a sledgehammer for nearly two decades. (Don’t even get started on the disgusting manner in which Condoleezza Rice was caricatured over the term of her office in the Bush administration. Some of the nastier examples are captured here, at Powerline.)
Politics, as we are often reminded, is not beanball. But a single standard as to what is acceptable, and what is beyond the Pale with regard comment, comedy, commentary, and caricature would be much appreciated by those of us tending to the conservative side of the political scale, or even those of us who appreciate civility, and even-handed humorous needling of prominent personalities. Alleged comic, Samantha Bee, who came out with a truly vile comedic suggestion involving Ivanka Trump vamping her father to reverse certain policies of his and topped it by applying a degrading term – on a cable television show – to applause and cheers.
Well. Nice job of demonstrating the double standard in show business, when it comes to liberal and conservative personalities. At this moment, Samantha Bee still has a job, although I understand that she is down a couple of corporate sponsors. Well-done, national establishment media; showing your unmistakable contempt for at least half the public! What next, I wonder; Who among the lefty-inclined icons of entertainment is now saying, either literally or metaphorically, “Hold my beer/mineral water/trendy beverage-of-choice and watch this!â€
So, I meant to write something sarcastic and slashing about … whatever over the last weekend, but I got distracted by life, and by a couple of different news reports – one of them being that Kanye West apparently has gotten in touch with his inner conservative and decided – for the moment – to come out enthusiastically for Trump. While not a particular fan of his brand of pop music and acknowledging that his judgement may not be all that – the man married a Kardashian, for g*d’s sake – I have never heard of anyone calling him a stupid man. Talented – yes, fabulously successful, and financially well-rewarded for exercising those talents; there must be more to him than pure dumb luck. Lamentable as it is to me that present-day celebrities wield more social influence than is good for them, and for us … that someone with that much influence in the black community is pointing out some self-evident truths must count for something.
I cannot decide if Kanye West initiated a preference cascade, or he was sharp enough to see that Trump’s policies were benefiting urban black communities in a substantial way a way that Obama promised but never delivered, and made a rational decision to speak his mind and get out in front of it all. It has been suggested that this is all a gigantic trolling of conservatives anyway; still seems like going a bit too over the edge, in ginning up publicity for an album or something. In any case, Kanye West certainly has provoked a backlash of his own, with Mad Maxine Walters spouting inane and condemnatory gibberish in the manner which we have come to expect of her, Ta-Ne-Hissy Fit Coates spouting likewise in a somewhat more literate manner.
The other matter which drew my attention, are reports that terminally-ill John McCain now is saying that he never wanted Sarah Palin as his VP in the 2008 presidential campaign. And he doesn’t want President Trump coming to his funeral. That first sentiment strikes me as spiteful, the second as ungracious, although Senator McCain will be in no position to complain in the eventuality. Spiteful, because it was clear to me at the time that adding her to the ticket was about the only thing that energized his campaign at all; having her on board was the one thing that energized me and a lot of others about what was a spiritless and by-rote campaign. Spiteful again, the way that his inner circle basically threw her to the dogs, blaming her for the failure. Looking back now on how it all played out, I wonder if McCain was ever really serious about pursuing the presidency in 2008 – was he always intended to lose? He did suspend campaigning, which seemed like an inexplicable decision then. Was the fix in for Hillary the Inevitable, and then for Obama, the Fresh Prince of Chicago; John McCain was just there to make a show for the establishment GOP and then gallantly concede? Supposing that was the plan, and everyone but Sarah Palin was playing along with it? Five years ago, fifteen, even – I would have thought that was political paranoia talking but considering the recently-revealed shenanigans of the Clinton-Trump campaign – I can’t quite be so dismissive. Was Sarah Palin just picked as convincing window-dressing for a deliberately self-sabotaged campaign, at the cost of her own formerly quite promising political career?
Discuss, if you can bear it.
I am distracted this week, through having to oversee and assist with a spot of home renovation, and the launch of Book Six of the Luna City Chronicles – One Half Dozen of Luna City, which is available as of today in print, Kindle and other ebook formats – although by no means have I not paid attention to various news hiccups which caught my fleeting attention as they went past.
As a parent, I can’t help but be sympathetic and supportive of little Alfie Evans’ parents, whose’ medical situation was as heartbreaking as it was mysterious and likely terminal. Just as I cannot help being viciously cynical regarding the decision by hospital and National Health Service administrators to set the poor tot on the so-called Liverpool Care pathway. Over the strenuous objections of his parents, the church which his parents apparently belonged to, any number of advocates for the rights of parents – all life support cut off, including oxygen, nourishment and water, with the powers of the State and its police minions standing by to enforce the dictates of the state. More »
One of my internet guilty pleasures is perusing the website of the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper, both the US and UK sides. I know – in the grand scheme of things, the Daily Mail is about one half-step up from a tabloid. The captions and headlines often give evidence of being written by middle-school students innocent of any knowledge of conventional grammar or spelling, they employ the execrable Piers Morgan, editorially despise Donald Trump, and have this inexplicable and unholy fascination with all things Kardashian. In my early blogging days, I favored the rather more high-class Times of London, and the Telegraph, but they went all pay-wall and frankly, hard to read. In any case and against the above-listed foibles and more, the Daily Mail is a free and straightforward read. Start at the top and scroll down; no hopscotching around to the various menu headings, hoping to get lucky and find something interesting. They nearly always do provide some daily amusement, or horror, depending on tastes. And they cover American news without fear or favor – although, as noted, they have no abiding affection for The Donald. They didn’t have for The Barack, either, so I’ll take what I can get, for easy AM reading.
This week’s headline bruhaha made the American conservative side of the blogosphere develop that kind of nervous eyelid twitch demonstrated by Inspector Clouseau’s boss in the classic Pink Panther series: an elderly retiree in a distant London suburb surprised a pair of burglars who had broken into his house in the middle of the night with the intent of robbery and god knows what other kind of criminal mayhem. This being England, land of hope and glory and strict gun control, the thirty-something burglar (who had a comprehensive record as an honest-work-shy professional criminal) was armed with an assault screwdriver, with which he menaced the home-owner. Much to everyone’s surprise – including, no doubt, the professional burglar and his faithful sidekick – the elderly retiree succeeded in defending himself against a pair of younger and presumably bigger men. Indeed, one of the felonious pair was stabbed fatally with his own screwdriver, collapsing in the street outside, whereupon his faithful sidekick abandoned him, gunned their escape vehicle, and vanished in a cloud of exhaust. (The police are searching for him, at last result, although they have located the burned-out escape vehicle. So much for honor among thieves, and the ability of the London police force.) The assault screwdriver-wielding professional career criminal was found, bloodied and dying in the street, taken to a hospital, wherein he expired. Well, they always said that crime doesn’t pay, even though for him it seemed that the eventual bill was a long time coming. More »
Damned if I know, as my educated guess as a long-time milblogger is probably about as good as yours. I never had a Myspace account – too busy with the original milblog, I guess, to be aware of or want to participate in any of the original or prototype Facebook iterations. Never got into Twitter, although I do have a barely-used, and all but neglected account, which I am camping on, since there is another author Celia Hayes out there, who likely would scoop it up, as soon as I vacated that account. (Yes, I am, spiteful that way. That other Celia apparently never did a google-search, upon deciding to publish her contemporary rom-coms. There is such a thing as due diligence…)
See – I am a long-form blogger. There are those of us whose skill is witty epigrams, or slashingly vicious put-downs on a daily basis. Mine is not; I prefer to open up a document, meander at my own pace, and then hit “publish.†Tedious, I know, for those readers with the attention-span of a gnat, but my most intense literary influences where those of the Victorians, who wrote complicated sentences, some of them lasting for at least a quarter of a page, if not for longer. My sense of humor (as well as my tastes in architecture) was set in stone by the influence of a book in the parental collection: Osbert Lancaster’s Here of All Places, who was at least as good as a cartoonist as he was a wordsmith, if slightly ponderous and wonderfully dry.
When I began seriously scribbling on more than a weblog around 2008, I began connecting with other independent writers; the largest congeries of us assembled at first through an Amazon discussion group, swapping experiences, opportunities, and advice on marketing our books. A good many in the group had been on the fringes of traditional publishing in various editorial or technical capacities. Their experiences and insights into the dark heart of what I took to calling the Literary-Industrial Complex were invaluable to the rest of us.
In the light of recent events, one of those pieces of marketing advice has proven to be quite prescient: that is, utilize social media as you must – but don’t bet the farm on it. One should not put all of one’s hard-written content into a basket controlled by others; suck up the expense of your own website, mirror-post your content – because, if for some reason, the social media platform goes under, or takes against you, all your work can and will be lost. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter – all easy, popular, convenient … but when – when, and not if – the politicized and mostly left-of-center providers of the service decide to shadow-ban, demonetize or close your account, you will be stuck. I had a good three or four years’ worth of archive posts on Open Salon, which evaporated into the ether, when Open Salon had their plug pulled by management. Didn’t lose much, save for some of the connections, when that platform went down. I do have a Facebook account for myself as an author, and for several other of my enterprises – not that I post, connect to, or repost anything but the most neutral and anodyne materiel on them. I came into this internet game with a sense of probity already hard-learned, having as a military broadcaster to always consider what I said, wrote, and posted, from the public affairs point of view. Once what you have said on air – it’s out there. No reconsideration can draw it back or erase any line of it.
The social media oligarchs who control such venues have decided – for whatever reasons – to get in touch with their militantly liberal side, consigning better than half the country to perdition and obscurity. I have no idea why, although I can guess at a few possible motivations. Are they so thickly insulated in their bubble of the like-minded that they are genuinely baffled at the existence of conservatives of any stripe? Are they frightened; scared out of their wits at that straw-other built up in their own minds, and hysterically lashing out at the perceived threat by calling it hate speech, or terming conservatives a threat to the community? Or are the social media lords and the media nobility vengefully blaming half the country for not obediently falling into line and voting for Hillary, and punishing the outspoken for our lack of faith in Her Inevitableness?
And what action can we take in response? Can we switch to gab.ai from Twitter, MeWe from Facebook, post to Vimeo instead of YouTube, or explore other alternatives? Will a substantial shift to alternate social media platforms have any effect on oligarchs like Zuckerberg? Discuss.
In Iowahawk’s deathless phrase regarding the establishment press, “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.†Here it is a weekend and a couple of working days after the release of the notorious and long-awaited FISA memo, and the relatively conservative side of the blogosphere is still happily chewing it over. Doubtless the professional national media wishes the whole matter would just go away already, just because. Frankly, the whole matter reminds me of the swiftboat veterans and the matter of John Kerry’s service in Vietnam.
For weeks before the mainstream establishment media deigned to notice the whole kerfuffle, the blogosphere was a-bubble with discussions of how Kerry had gamed his tour in Vietnam and made his political bones afterwards by being prominent anti-war protestor – to the disgust of those who had served with him. (As an officer and gentleman, Kerry looks to have been an unlovely combination of Frank Burns and a grown-up Eddie Haskell.) And the establishment national media desperately put their fingers in their ears and sang la-la-la-la, no doubt wishing passionately that the whole thing would go away … but it didn’t. Eventually, they had to come to grips with the fact John Kerry’s comrades during his truncated tour of duty felt they had been maligned and insulted by his subsequent antics. The media did manage to twist the phrase ‘swiftboating’ into having another meaning entirely, but it didn’t win Kerry the White House, so we got off lucky in that event.
The corrupting of the FBI is a hundred times worse than John Kerry’s cynical attempts at burnishing his military service for higher office, in my opinion. He was, is, and remains a tone-deaf, clueless fool, notable for charmless ineptitude, a legend in his own mind. The weaponizing of a national crime-investigating agency against a political opponent is a far more serious affair. Here we have a shady oppo-research outfit, working up a bespoke but unproven suit of slime, paid for by partisan political interests, passing it surreptitiously to friends in the establishment media … and to the FBI, to use as justification for spying on a political opponent’s campaign. This is the kind of scummy political shenanigans which distinguishes Third World banana republics, where the president-for-life’s cousin owns the biggest newspaper/television station in the country, and his brother-in-law runs the national police force, and no one, by god, had better get in the way of the president-for-life’s stranglehold on the body politic. The parties who enabled this whole sordid farrago have got to be brought to account – and brought to account in a manner that stings, and demonstrates to the public that there are penalties to be paid for reducing this proud republic to the level of some third world hellhole.
As long as we are still talking about this, blogging about it, commenting on the mainstream media’s comment threads, passing around the word on social media, the issue is still on the table. The national establishment media may wish like hell that it would all go away, but as long as we still have the soap-box, the ballot box and the other boxes … we cannot let this matter pass. Discuss.
A discussion at According to Hoyt this last week developed from a long look the recent so-called “woman’s marchâ€; an event which appeared to really be an open-air scream therapy session for a certain subset of the human population. They had the opportunity to mingle with others of their ilk, dress up in pink hats and vagina costumes and inform the rest of the world (yet again) of their acute unhappiness that Hillary, the Dowager Duchess of Chappaqua, formerly known as Her Inevitableness had not been able to win an election rigged in her favor, and that Donald Trump was currently the President of the United States. MS Hoyt speculated on what, exactly, the protesters were on about; what rights were imperiled, exactly? What did all the feel-good, content-free slogans have to do with anything in the lives of real, live women and men working for a living? And how did dressing up as an anatomically sort-of-correct vagina have to do with anything, in the real world. And in the long run, weren’t such pointless demonstrations of hysteria actually counter-productive, in that genuine misogynists would point to them as proof positive that women were too flighty, too emotional, to damn silly to manage anything, let alone their own lives.
Following on these ruminations, the comment thread wandered this way and that, as threads with three or four hundred comments (or even more) tend to do, until a regular commenter who goes by the nickname of “Kirk†posted:
“Go back and look at all the really base things which used to be said, and then compare that to the actual things going on today, and the behaviors endemic to many of the so-called minority groups. I swear to God, it’s like someone has sat down with a list, and said to their people “OK, we’re gonna make things look like those old-time racists and misogynists were absolutely right.â€
In this bright, shiny, barely driven-off-the-car-lot new century, women are seen by the professional feminist class as easily-offended, fragile, put-upon delicate snowflakes, too fine, pure and noble to endure the rough and tumble of academia and the working world, and certainly too fragile to administer a withering rebuke when offended. Taking instant offense and cherishing grudges as if they were delicate orchids have been raised to a high art. This, if the women perpetuating this kind of thing stopped to consider the implications and possible outcome – will lead to nowhere good. (It likely already has led to nowhere good as far as the dating scene goes, for the girls who treat guys like dirt … and then complain there are no good men out there.) What intelligent person, male or female, will want to have anything beyond the bare minimum required to do with a hysterical, vengeful, grudge-nurturing woman in an academic or a business setting? Hire one of these women, or promote to a position of authority? Not if you are a sane business owner. As Kirk put it in another comment, “The feminists are trying to persuade the rest of us that women truly are too fragile and flighty to be out in public, and they can’t even grasp the final implications of their acts and goals.â€
The professional feminist class mucking it up for women in general is bad enough, damaging enough, but the other part of what Kirk mentioned is something that I have wondered about for years; the racism angle. How damaging can it be for the African-American minority, that the black urban culture is everything that the most virulent 19th century racists accused Negroes of being; hyper-violent, sex-obsessed, ignorant, brutal, and incapable of being civilized. And here the same elements of violence, sex-obsession, willful ignorance, and brute force, are all glorified in contemporary black urban culture, in the name of ‘keeping it real.’ The KKK, or what is left of them, hardly have to bother with burning crosses or organizing lynch mobs any more, not when the urban black population has taken over donning their own chains. Your thoughts?
“All Norfolk need do is sign that paper and treason will have been committed…â€
“Then let him sign it, and let it all be done.†– from the movie Elizabeth
Every couple of days, I look at the Trump-bashing headline stories on various news sources that I follow, and I think … nah, they can’t possibly top this, for spittle-flecked, screaming, chew-through-the-restraints insane rage. Yet within days – yep; topped, and topped again. I have never seen such spittle-flying rage against an American president, and I am old enough to remember the animus against Nixon, and especially Johnson. I was only in my early teens, and a serious consumer of the LA Times (back when it was a substantial newspaper), yet the sustained abuse of Johnson on every aspect of his person and character (both real and imagined) was so unbelted that I actually rather felt sorry for the man. Knowing of his faults then and later, much criticism of him was richly deserved, but the especially vile stuff, I think we could have all done without. Honest criticism can be done without the spittle-flecked irrational rage, although in the Age of Trump such clinical detachment seems again to have dropped even farther out of fashion.
Where was I, before diverted into ‘60’s nostalgia? Oh, yes – the latest Trump Flapperoo; the book by one Michael Wolff, alleged to be an account of the chaotic goings on in the early days of the Trump administration, as observed by Mr. Wolff. Although his resemblance to Dr. Evil is about the most remarkable thing about him, Mr. Wolff is alleged to be a reporter, who taped hours of interviews and observed much during the time that he had extensive access to the White House. However, a substantial portion of those quoted do not recall ever saying anything like what Mr. Wolff has attributed to them, and dispute his accounts of other matters. As the linked story points out, “… the way that Wolff’s account is written makes it impossible for readers to discern if Wolff was actually there or is recreating conversations based on interviews with unnamed sources.†Or to put it bluntly – if he has just made stuff up.
The key thing is that much of the media and the desperately anti-Trumpers want to believe Mr. Wolff; fake but accurate, to resurrect the thinking during the great GW Bush/Texas Air National Guard memo fiasco. The more rabid anti-Trumpites wanted so badly to believe in the stupidity/insanity/malignity of Donald Trump that many of them fell, hook, line, and sinker for the Gorilla Channel spoof attributed to Mr. Wolff’s book. Just too delicious a tidbit to be skeptical, which raises the distinct possibility of much of the rest being just too delicious and conformational to be skeptical about.
And why did such a reporter have such far-ranging access to the White House anyway? Did someone at the highest levels decide – as it was put in the movie quote above – to let Michael Wolff and his allies in the anti-Trump run free and make credulous fools of themselves with shoddy and incredibly biased reporting? Has the Wolff book and it’s rapturous reception been an epic trolling of the establishment media? If so, should we crown whoever thought of this as the Lord Galactic Troll now … or wait a decent interval. Discuss.
Which, naturally, we are hearing little about from our Dear National News Media. This article explains why.
I swear, I have no idea why the denizens of celebrity-world are going nuts lately. The distinct possibility is that most of them were always nuts, and I – despite once having had a nice collection of subscriptions to publications like Premiere, Entertainment Weekly, and Rolling Stone, and a mild and mostly professional interest in the entertainment field generally – managed to not notice the frothing waves of insanity emanating from the world of popular entertainment … since … Well, I think some entertainment figures began to go nuts about a decade ago, but in the last year it’s been … OMG, are these people allowed out without a keeper?
And this was before Pervenado, and the revelation to the wider public that apparently just about every big producer, star, or media figure in a position of authority is a sex-crazed perv who cannot keep their nasty hands off lower-level staff or prospective employees. Well, it wasn’t like the existence of the casting couch was that big a secret, but still …
No, I speak this morning of the manner in which a wide variety of media personalities and performers who once appeared to know that sales of their movie tickets, their personal appearances, concerts – all of that, which were based on personal popular appeal, or at least, not kicking the larger audience in the teeth by bringing in matters political/social to front and center. It’s a sad thing for me, to recall that once I thought Rosie O’Donnell was funny and basically harmless. She had the single funniest line ever in A League of the Own which was a slam on Madonna – richly deserving of it in several ways, even back then. So was Janeane Garofalo, too – and a whole raft of other entertainment figures, until Bush derangement took them up to the edge. Now in the last year or so, sheer frothing Trump-hate pushed them over, and it is not a pretty sight at all.
Trump-hate has turned them deranged. Seriously – no other word for this quite fits. Seriously, I cannot figure it – because until two years ago, he was one of them! A grade-C celebrity, a buffoonish caricature, kind of larger than life, a bit (OK, a lot! )vulgar, seemingly pretty competent as a big-city real estate developer – but otherwise, one of them. He went to their weddings, was a habitué of the places familiar to the big-city celebrity class, appeared to be a pretty representative social liberal of the moneyed urbanite class … and yet now appears to be The Worst Person In The World.
Looking at the entertainment news headlines over the last decade, it appears that only a few
entertainers are of a socio/politically conservative bent, or have the wit to keep such opinions to themselves on the sensible grounds of not wishing to piss off a good half of their potential audience.
Rosie O’Donnell has become a special case, in the last few days, by offering (via her Twitter feed) what appears to be a bribe to sitting officials. (more here, thanks to Ace of Spades HQ.) This goes beyond trash-talking. This offer can be, if one is inclined to take it at face value (and not as a ‘joke’ as Ms. O’Donnell will doubtless claim that it is) construed as an effort by a person of wealth and standing to peremptorily override the votes of those elected to carry out the wishes of ordinary citizens. This is a serious business, as Ms. O’Donnell’s legal adviser may be reminding her over this weekend. Yes – us ordinary voters are extraordinarily humor-deficient when it comes to having our elected officials bribed and threatened by the wealthy and connected, miffed at not having their own political whims catered to. Discuss, if you can bear it.
Well, this has been a festival of tantrums, has it not? What with ISIS/ISIL/Whatever is now huffing and puffing, threatening to blow our Christmas cottage down, and to execute President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Might have some luck with some sub-normally-intelligent specimen of Muslim humanity with delusions of adequacy walking into a public place with a badly-constructed pipe-bomb, but looking on the most recent fearless lone-wolf jihadi warrior, who only managed to semi-eviscerate himself in trying to blow up … which reminds me, have the usual suspects begun winging on about the anti-Muslim backlash which, miraculously, never seems to descend? I’ve been sick as a dog all week with a seasonal cold, so it might have actually happened, and I never noticed. Meanwhile, the Palestinians and their fellow-traveler-symps in the Western world have declared another day of rage with regard to President Trump following through on the ever-so-tentative concept agreed upon by how many previous administrations – that the US embassy in Israel should be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Cue the day of pique, anger, rage, frenzy, furor, indignation, and bluster … any day which ends in ‘y’ will suit for the pathetic Palestinians, exploited by other Arab nations for seventy years. Look, Pallies, this is what happens when you and your badly-chosen Arab allies loose wars repeatedly, persistently and without fail pick the wrong side in a conflict, choose thuggish leaders who take the sweet, sweet internationally-donated lolly and stash it in a Swiss bank account… and then turn around and blame your self-inflicted woes on the nearest handy target. Nope, sorry – the well of sympathy in me towards the Poor Prosecuted Palestinians went dry sometime around 9/11, or possibly when in the depths of one or another of the intifadas – committing, enabling, excusing all sorts of terrorist atrocities – their spokes-feeb took a breath and whined that everyone in the West regarded the Pallies as terrorists. There is that concept concerning cause and effect, ya know. Gaza could have been a garden and beach-leisure spot, cheerfully raking in Israeli tourist dollars over the last seventy years, but no … better to marinate in poisonous resentment. Again – this is what happens when you a) pick bad allies, b) lose wars, and c) blame everyone else but yourselves.
Meanwhile, the Pervnado churns on and on and on, with the latest accused MCP being Russell Simmons. Has any powerful male figure in the national news media, music, the movies, or any other establishment not been a complete pig when it comes to conduct, professional or otherwise with women; women he worked with, interviewed, or who had careers which they hoped he would enable through being nice to him, or at least not slapping him into the next county for demanding sexual services? Boundaries, ladies and gentlemen – are nice things to have, loudly to publicize and faithfully to observe. Note that no one has been snickering at VP Mike Pence lately, for being a woman-hating prude, in never yet being alone with a woman not his wife.
And finally, kudos to Sarah Huckabee Saunders, she of the thankless job of daily wrangling the White House press corps – a body which for the most part increasingly resembles a class of bitchy middle-school mean girls, with her as their homeroom teacher. Looks like a darned nice pecan pie too. A note to April Ryan, and Rosie O’Donnell, too – a pecan pie is not that hard to make, even if you make the crust from scratch.
(Note: A Fifth of Luna City is now up in both paperback and Kindle ebook. Lone Star Glory is, as of yet, only available in Kindle – the paperback version won’t be up until around the end of the year.)
Seriously, I am stuck for a reaction to the news this week that both Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor have both been let go, with appropriate force, by their employers for sexual conduct unbecoming and unprofessional in the extreme with women in their respective workplaces. Earlier in the week it was howls for the heads of John Conyers and Al Franken, giving the impression of those gentlemen holding on to their congressional seats by their bare fingertips, while Cokie Roberts confesses that ‘everyone’ knew not to get into an elevator with Congressman Conyers. Jeez Louise, is there anyone in the higher levels of show business, the media and the government who isn’t a total woman-mauling pig? Anyone? And is there anyone in the media specifically charged with covering show biz and politics who isn’t complicit in covering these matters – with a pillow, until they stop moving, in the deathless phrase of Iowahawk? Can we afford to wait until our fearless media fifth-column representatives are cornered like a rat and forced to ‘fess up to deliberately looking the other way? Oh, and thanks, Cokie – for sitting on that bit of intelligence regarding sexual abuse on Capitol Hill. Just couldn’t bear to tear yourself away from the sweet, sweet source of social power in Capitol City, and face the prospect of never being invited to the good cocktail parties again, could you? Between you and Garrison Keillor, I feel like demanding a refund of every single dollar in pledges I ever made to public radio and television. I will keep the Blake’s 7 tee shirt and the La Madelaine cookbook, though. (The tee shirt is trashed, and the cookbook is pretty well-worn.)
Granted, the accusations – so fair – aimed at the lugubrious king of live variety show public radio seem rather thin, but the roundelay of accusation is still young as far as Garrison K. is concerned. I ought not to be taking such unseemly and unchristian satisfaction out of his embarrassment, since there seem to be less than half-a-dozen accusers on record in his case, but he has been so ugly regarding Republicans, conservatives, citizens of Flyoverlandia, and small rural towns in general over the last twenty years (or more), that I am more than happy to point, laugh, and privately make scurrilous jokes regarding the size of his gut and his genitalia. But the print intifada regarding Mr. Lauer and his workplace practices seems to be exhaustively documented … again, I say, “Oh, my.†Between those who played along, those who ran silently screaming – and those who knew but preferred not to share with the general public … is there anyone at the topmost levels of the media, show business or the government whose hands are not dripping with …ahem, certain bodily fluids?
Of course, this whole farrago can rightly be compared to the Salem witch trials, or even the great 1980s Satanic Day Care Scare, in that public hysteria mounted up and up, and the whole thing took on a ghastly life of it’s own – never mind that most, if not all of the accused in those cases were innocent, which doesn’t seem to be the case here. Public hysteria is never a pretty sight; even – and especially – if those involved in the whipping-up eventually express remorse and regret later, over having been carried away. Likely it will prove the same with this current round of national public hysteria. But I must confess that I find the spectacle of national establishments and industries who have spent the last twenty years (or more) lecturing ordinary Americans about our various failings (political, social, sexual and racial) being so thoroughly shamed. Discuss, if you can stop snickering long enough.
Frankly, the kerfuffle regarding Roy Moore’s alleged dalliances with just barely legal teenage girls four decades ago smacks to this observer as a put-up job by out of-state media and out-of-state politicians of both parties who apparently regard his candidacy for national office as an affront to the Ruling Class. Suspect scribbles in an old school annual and Gloria Allred in full-throated accusatory mode are, as in the words of Gilbert and Sullivan’s character Pooh-Bah, “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.â€
Mind you, he might well have displayed, as a young thirty-ish male, a liking for female company somewhat more than ten years younger; such female company being somewhat easier to impress than those closer to his age at the time. (In previous centuries, such an age gap would hardly have raised an eyebrow. This was pretty much the ideal for much of history: thirty-year old man, well-established in a good trade, able to provide for a young wife of prime child-bearing age.) Frankly, though – the man has been in local politics for thirty years. If this is the worst that can be said about him, and the good people of Alabama don’t appear to have any problems repeatedly voting him into local office … then why does the national Republican party leadership feel obliged to intervene? It’s as if they (and others) are simply outraged at the concept of people actually choosing a candidate who is not totally Ruling Party-compliant. “We’ll make the important decisions for you, you poor deluded peasants.â€
And if he as a much younger man made persistent romantic overtures to very much younger women, it’s still a vast improvement on doing a Weinstein – that is, whacking off and depositing the results on an innocent potted plant on a regular basis.
Which brings me around to the great Hollywood Sexual Assault meltdown … I’m almost afraid to look at the headlines first thing every morning of late; someone else whose movies I never watched is going to accuse or be accused of sexual harassment; that is anything from being a rude and abusive a-hole, all the way up to assault or rape, involving the same sex, the opposite sex, under-age sex of either or however many genders there are these days, or of any convenient plant life. The up side to this is that too many of them are consulting with their lawyers (the guilty), or their supportive “Me-too†group (the offended against) to take time to lecture the rest of us about our disappointing shortcomings – our failure to vote for Hillary, our global-climate-change skepticism, our unashamed racism, our failure to surrender our personal weaponry, and to separate the glass from the tin cans and the paper when putting out the recyclables. The next Academy Awards is going to be a real hoot, I’m telling you.
Any bets on where it is going to be broadcast from? San Quentin, Folsom, or Pelican Bay? Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.
Unchristian though it is to confess to such a feeling, I have been taking a very mean-minded satisfaction in the ongoing meltdown of both the NFL, the mainstream Hollywood establishment, and now the Democratic National Committee has come due for their share. Paraphrasing P.J. O’Rourke – just desserts, just hors de oeuvres, a just main course of crow! So, the NFL is continuing to go down the road to hell paved with social justice warrior good intentions, the list of male power-brokers among the Hollywood glitterati accused of sexually-exploiting women, other men, teenagers of both sexes and ornamental potted plants is expanding geometrically, and now it seems as if Hillary Clinton and her campaign advisers did quite the number on her own political party during the campaign which ended exactly a year ago. Even as Hillary Clinton toured the country, explaining “What Happenedâ€, it seems that the former chair of the DNC, Donna Brazile has penned her own memoir of the campaign. I suppose that in the wake of a political upset of the magnitude we experienced last election day, everyone involved at the highest level is obligated to sing some version of the old song “If only they had listened to me.â€
In the linked story,
“Brazile writes that she inherited a national party in disarray, in part because President Obama, Clinton and Wasserman Schultz were “three titanic egos†who had “stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes.â€â€
So, if I am understanding this whole imbroglio correctly, Hillary’s people took over the national Democrat establishment after Little Debbie ran it into the ground, and diverted most all of the funds raised jointly by the DNC and Hillary into Hillary’s campaign coffers, thereby cutting out Bernie Sanders. I am not the least surprised at Sanders’ lack of fiduciary sense – the man barely scraped a living until he went into politics – still, I thought he had been in politics long enough to have learned something – like how not to get blindsided by avaricious scumbags. Well, at least he got a vacation house out of it all, so perhaps he did learn something.
The real surprise is that Donna Brazile is coming out swinging at Hillary – and even landing the crushing blow or two. Does this signify a fracture in Party unity? Is Hillary and the Clinton Machine being thrown out of the window and under the bus, and not a moment too soon? What have the fracture-lines been drawn, who has control of the Party now, and who among the Party faithful will be rewarded? Discuss. I’ll make popcorn – lightly salted and with real butter, not that orange-oil gack that they put on popcorn in the movie theaters.
(Sorry for the lack of posting – I am trying to finalize A Fifth of Luna City, and Lone Star Glory — the follow-up to Lone Star Sons, and the days are just all too short. Herewith a rant about certain recent developments in pop culture for your weekend edification.)
Just to make it clear, I do not think that the NFL, or the So-Cal based movie-TV-media production industry usually described by the simple designation of ‘Hollywood’ are going to wither up and disappear in a puff of smoke and a puddle of goo like the Wicked Witch when Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her. No, likely the first will be diminished to relative insignificance over the insistence of many players to ‘take a knee’ during the national anthem, after a long train of other actions which increasingly put the well-reimbursed celebrity athletes of the NFL at loggerheads with the audiences in Flyoverlandia who watched games from the stand, or on TV, purchased season tickets, merchandise and premium cable service with the big daddy sports channel, ESPN.
By all the reports that I see, attendance at games is dropping at present, viewers are cutting the cable cord, and discovering other fun things to do on a Sunday, or even just other sports to take an interest in. Football hasn’t always been the most popular spectator sport in the US, not by a long shot; baseball, boxing, horse-racing all had their day, and may very well again at this rate. Patience with professional football players, and the management thereof, especially when they choose to play the race card, has run out among working-class whites, most of whom have frankly not seen much in the way of privilege accruing to their color, no matter how may academics specializing in ‘something’ studies yammer on about it. At this rate, the next Superbowl may be played for an audience of fifteen in the stands, not counting player entourages, and so few watching the half-time show that a sixty-second spot might be had for the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee.
And as for Hollywood and the growing sexual-harassment accusations, first against Harvey Weinstein, now against James Toback, and the murmurs of child and younger teen actors victimized by pedophiles in positions of power are growing louder. Mind you, the casting couch thing has been around since there was a movie industry in Hollywood, and frankly, if aspiring starlets want to get down in the mud and wrestle with a pig like Weinstein of their own will and ambition … just have the decency not to lecture and accuse the rest of us regarding abusive male patriarchy afterwards, ‘kay?
But it seems like Hollywood movie releases have had as lackluster a showing this season as has the NFL, as increasingly, people with an entertainment dollar to spend are not spending it at the multiplex on opening weekend. Do those movies generally just suck increasingly of late, is it the expensive multiplex experience which just sucks, or are audiences just fed to the back teeth with political correctitude and being condescended to by their inferiors and choosing to spend their time and money on another form of entertainment?
Those matters are being hotly discussed hotly behind closed doors in the expensive management offices of those enterprises most deeply concerned, in the media, across the blogosphere, and may as well be discussed here, too. Whither the NFL, and establishment Hollywood?
Accustomed as I am to contemplating matters more serious than the doings of the denizens of Hollywood, I can’t keep away from the current spectacle regarding the casting out of Harvey “Jabba the Hutt†Weinstein from all polite (hah!) Hollywood and Democrat political society, where once he strode like an unstoppable behemoth. (How seriously can you take a guy who cannot either grow a decent and serious beard, or learn to use a razor. Really.) It’s like one of those horrific multi-vehicle pile-ups on the internet super-highway, which leave vehicles teetering, smoking and crunched together in improbable formations – and all us normals out in Flyoverlandia left thinking thoughts along the lines of “what brought all that on?†and “he did what … into a potted plant?†or meditating upon the ghastly nature of the mass entertainment business, especially when it climbs into the sack with politicians, and begins the calculated roughing up of the establishment news media.
Because the existence of the show-business casting couch is a tradition of long duration, this shouldn’t be any surprise to anyone but the most sheltered. Yes, I am certain that antique sellers in Hollywood must have warehouses full of certified, vintage, and slightly worn casting-couches in inventory, broken down by studio, director/producer, and starlet, with documented authentication for each. Likely only the most fortunate, virginal, talented, and determined actresses escaped surrendering their virtue to get that part, back in the day, and I’d venture a guess that many who later averred that they had escaped with said article intact, did so with fingers crossed behind their back.
It has been no secret that Harvey “Jabba the Hutt†Weinstein was one of those taking full advantage of his position – in the prone, or perhaps standing position. I ought not to make fun of anyone’s physical appearance, though – not being a beauty queen myself. He might be, in person, the most charming and scintillating man in the world. Not that I’d be interested in finding out for sure – but still. It’s not the physical appearance of the man which raises my old-line feminist hackles; it’s rather that he appears to have been the most vicious and vengeful of bullies from a long time back. The Daughter Unit was an aficionado of a show-biz gossip blog called D-Listed, and Jabba the Weinstein’s proclivities were apparently common knowledge there, and in other venues … like all over Hollywood – to the point of having jokes made about it on Thirty Rock, and at the Academy Awards. So; Jabba the Weinstein was only carrying on an established tradition. Look – if it is an honest and willing seller, and an honest and willing buyer, delivering what has been promised; no problem, aside from the moral aspect of the deal. Not my world, not my circus, not my monkeys.
The unfortunate and unacceptable bit is when it involves malice against those women who do not want to go along to get along. (I suppose that we are all fortunate that Jabba the Weinstein appears to be sexually straight … otherwise, the vicious comment about that alternative writes itself.) His reputation appears to be that of a vengeful man, who got off from bullying the relatively powerless … indeed, demonstrating to the relatively powerless exactly how powerless they were, and deriving considerable and possibly sexual satisfaction thereby. Likely the ornamental potted plants in many locations could testify to this. As well as the various starlets who didn’t want to go along to get along, and thereby mysteriously vanished from public awareness.
The revelation, the testimony of dozens, the condemnations now flooding in … all started out of the clear blue by a story in the Esteemed Paper of Record (The NY Times, for the sarcasm-impaired) and followed by another in the New Yorker … all strongly-defended redoubts of the Ruling Class, as it is in this sad century … and in the brief matter of days, Jabba the Weinstein’s former friends are frantically denouncing him, his company has fired him, and the political powerhouses which were sufficiently fortunate to have his monetarily-expressed affection and support are now frantically denying that they ever knew that man. Even his wife has ditched him, and he has fled the country – apparently to seek sexual-addiction healing in some luxurious European locale, possibly the next VIP suite over from Roman Polanski …
All very curious for those of us inclined to think – as it is said of great scientific discoveries; “Hmmm. That’s odd.†Why now? He has been a sexual-exploitative scumbag for decades, it’s compressively documented. And he was a big Hillary-bundler, and such a dear, dear friend of the Obamas that they allowed their elder daughter to intern in his enterprise. Presumably the Secret Service lurked handily, and Malia isn’t really the aspiring starlet type, poor dear … but still. One does have to wonder, why is a major Hollywood bundler, a conduit of cash in such quantities that I couldn’t even think to earn through honest labor and royalties for my amusing scribbles the amounts of donations which poured in through Jabba the Weinstein’s labors as a donation bundler for the Clintons and other Democrat Party pals…
Has his usefulness just come to an end? And why as the National Establishment Media now cutting Jabba the Weinstein loose, to twist slowly and friendless in the wind? Discuss, if this kind of traffic-wreck amuses or intrigues you.
Of course, it’s a given that the cries for tighter gun control would become ever louder and more intense after the Mandalay Bay massacre of attendees at an outdoor country music festival. It happens after every such event … although I’m under the impression that such cries were fairly muted after the attempted assassination of Republican baseball team members two months ago by a disaffected Bernie Bro named … what was his name, anyway? Oh, yeah – James Hodgkinson. I had to look it up. Funny way that he went down the memory hole, wasn’t it? It was almost as if it never happened, and James Hodgkinson became an un-person in the eyes of the Establishment News Media. There are just some crises that just aren’t worth wheeling out the big anti-guns for, it would appear.
But I don’t have any problem bringing to mind Jared Lee Loughner. After he shot Representative Gabby Giffords, killed six people and wounded a dozen others, the great storm of protest about gun control arose, coeval with a twin great storm accusing eeeevil and irresponsible partisan rhetoric on the part of conservatives generally and Sarah Palin in particular of having inspired him. Well, it eventually developed that J.L. Loughner was inspired by nothing more than the voices in his head, being diagnosed by mental health professionals as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Us non-professionals just call it “bug-nutz crazy†and move on. Frankly, I’d rather have the discussion be about crazy control rather than gun control, but that is a much more difficult, complicated, and nuanced situation – the control of the bug-nutz crazy among us. Easier just to hyperventilate about gun control, and how gun owners are compensating for having small pee-pees or some such pseudo-scientific twaddle. It’s nothing more than a means of easy virtue-signaling for the ostentatiously virtuous members of the Bi-Coastal Ruling Class and their coterie of sycophants.
Returning to my original thought; the newly-energized voices of celebrities, celebrated anti-gunners, publicity-whoring politicians and freelance media likely will have no better luck this time around in demanding tighter and more controls, or even outright confiscation of privately-owned firearms. Riding rough-shod over the Second Amendment would take more juice than they have at present, or are likely to get.
Because … the example that springs to mind, out of one of many is the reaction of a now-ex top employee of the CBS legal department, one Hayley Geftman-Gold, who posted in a Facebook discussion thread that she was “not even sympathetic.’â€
“If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing, “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.â€
Hayley Geftman-Gold, who is of such a nose-bleedingly privileged strata of the Bi-Coastal Ruling Elite that her wedding was noted in the social pages of the NY Times (the supreme chronicler of the doings of the Bi-Coastal Ruling Elite) basically felt OK with registering her dislike of a whole class of people and her indifference to their mass murder; a people of whom she ostentatiously knows nothing, and cares even less. The only surprise in this otherwise tawdry and routine spectacle is that she was fired by CBS before the end of the day. Well, obviously CBS had realized (belatedly) that writing off a good portion of the country as irredeemable deplorables, or bigoted, racist untermenschen is perhaps a bad business plan. After all, they want our money/viewership.
Alas, MS Geftman-Gold is not singular in her dismissive bigotry. She is only a minor voice in a mighty chorus, pouring disdain, contempt, and outright hatred on the working class of flyover country in general, and those who had the temerity to vote for Trump in particular and other conservatives in general. Which is a pity, since I would think that one whose nuptials were celebrated by a rabbi would be a leeeetle more aware of what results when a group of people are systematically “othered†by the ruling classes. We know now that we are hated, despised, marked out for … whatever fate dictated by the Ruling Class. And that is why the gun control that they urge will likely not go anywhere. Because we know that they hate us.
Discuss, if you can bear it.
The mass freak-out following upon the election of The Donald to the highest office in the land continues unabated to this very day and hour. It’s been a little more than ten months; you’d have thought that the Hillary fans and the Bernie bros would have gained a bit of perspective, even a soupçon of philosophical acceptance. All contests, except for those held for elementary school-aged children where everyone gets a participation trophy, have winners and losers. But the political loss of the Dowager Duchess of Chappaqua to Donald Trump would appear to be the very first time that her loyal courtiers have ever experienced a tragedy of that magnitude, and so animus against Donald Trump and the people who voted for him continues unabated; loud, proud, 24-7 and ever more unhinged. (I’ve written before about this, at Chicagoboyz and here at NCO Brief.) It’s kind of hard to tell who the Hillary-adoring glitterati, entertainers, intellectuals and bureaucrats hate more; Donald Trump or the regular Joes and Josies who voted for him. And it’s not just the Trump-hate, but the continuing, relentless social justice warrior posturing about everything from gay marriage, transsexual privilege, to members of the black urban underclass having an unfortunately terminal encounter with the forces of law’n’order. It’s all become quite exhausting, even keeping track of who is supposed to be outraged by what.
This kind of hate and uncertainty can’t be good for a person, you know, but I’ll leave those people consumed by such feelings to worry about the condition of their own souls. Nothing I can do, write or say about the unwise and rampant politicization of practically everything will likely have any long effect on them … but there is one manner in which my actions, and the actions of others may already be having noticeable effects – and that is via the pocketbook.
Yes, we do not have to watch their movies, TV shows, or football games, or listen to their radio shows. We do not have to purchase comic books, regular books without illustrations, their magazines or newspapers. We do not have to purchase the cable package with ESPN or any other specialty channel, pay tuition to certain universities, attend their concerts or sign up for science fiction conventions which have been consumed from the inside by such politicization. Increasingly over the last months, and likely, the last few years – ordinary consumers of the right-of-center political and social persuasion are doing just that; turning off and dropping out. Look at the drop-off in movie attendance. The push for comic books to be trendily ‘woke’ and diverse – that looks to be affecting the market and not in a good way. The long-established and once-respected Worldcon science fiction convention looks to be spiraling the drain after the Sad Puppies fiasco. And now with the whole NFL ‘taking the knee’ during the national anthem, which has opened a new front in the cold civil war, and may very well take down the NFL into irrelevance. The usual perpetrators of jamming political correctness into every possible smidgeon of an opening may go on insisting that it is just, right and salutary to do so, and that they aren’t taking a hit from the audience because of it.
But the point of the matter is – the large part of an audience for a sports event, a movie, a book, a tv series or a comic – just want a bit of amusement, an enjoyable escape from the mundane and are resenting the heck out of getting a lecture instead. Ordinary people do not live, eat and breath social justice or political causes twenty-four hours in a day. By these stories linked and others too numerous to mention, I suspect they are tired beyond toleration of being hectored, lectured and beat about the head by those who do, and are voting with pocketbook. Your thoughts?
Just when I had begun to think that those who hate conservatives generally could not possible become any more irrational and deranged; that they had dug them so very deeply into the pit of despair, loathing and frustrated fury – along comes the twin scourge of “pro-Trump Republicans are Nazis!†united with the push to remove monuments with anything to do with the Confederacy from public spaces on the grounds that the historical figures so honored were supporting, defending or enabling the institution of chattel slavery. Some of the more creatively deranged or misinformed parties demanding the removal of such monuments have also expanded their monumental loathing to include Christopher Columbus, Fr. Junipero Serra, and Joan of Arc – although it is a puzzle as to why a French saint burned at the stake two centuries before the beginning of European settlement of North and South America should be slated for demolition or removal. Deep confusion on the part of the person who demanded its removal cannot be ruled out, although as my daughter has pointed out (rather snidely) chances are that they are a graduate of one of New Orleans’ finer public schools.
Still, I admit to being rather blindsided by the sudden storm of demands to remove these statues and monuments on the part of the current ‘red guards’ of the American left, remove them from the places where many of them had been installed for at least a hundred years and often longer. As an amateur historian, I find this horribly depressing; the monuments for both Confederate and Union heroes and events were put up within human memory as ghastly and savage a blood-letting as we ever inflicted on each other to this date. The question of chattel slavery and states’ rights sundered families, friends, communities, established churches, military academy classes; for four blood-soaked years, North and South tore at each other without pity or remorse … and at the end of it all, the country was painfully stitched together by millions of grave markers and the grief and regret of survivors. Indeed, the dedication of monuments was seen often as an honoring of former foes, an acknowledgement of courage and conviction, and of deep sorrow that it ever came to such a slaughter – a gesture of reconciliation. This kind of purpose is perhaps too subtle for the BLM/AntiFa/Red Guards faction to grasp, raised as they have been in relative security and plenty, suckling the teat of carefully fomented racial resentment, informed by a Zinnified view of history, and enraged beyond coherent dialog by the fact that better than half the voters in the country do not agree with them … on anything and everything. The Confederate memorials are a handy symbol, something which the rage of the BLM/AntiFa/Red Guards faction has seized upon as the heights from which to make a proxy war on the rest of us. Useless to point out to them that there is a danger of sparking a very real war, as bloody and desperate as the war that the statues commemorate.
It is a kind of madness, I have come to think over the past nine months since the election of Donald Trump; an irrational madness very much like the Great Satanic Day-Care Abuse madness of the 1980s and 1990s. This was a panic which grew and grew, sparked by the fears and uncertainties of parents, fanned to a wildfire by unscrupulous child welfare professionals, ambitious public prosecutors, and a very credulous media. Even at the time, soberer commenters were likening it to the Salem witchcraft trials. The Great Satanic Day-Care Abuse madness took longer to burn out, although at the end of it, the accused and convicted were mostly dead, not just locked up in prison. But in all three cases – there is a purpose behind the madness, and a whole group of interested parties hoping to make something for themselves out of encouraging it. In the case of the destruction of the monuments, memorials and establishments which most ordinary Americans cherish and honor – I cannot see how the campaign to destroy them will burn out of itself.
Discuss.
Just when I thought the national establishment news media had about reached the nadir of unethical, irresponsible and unprofessional behavior, here comes CNN, the bane of travelers stuck in airport terminals and hapless patients in doctors’ office waiting rooms everywhere. to say, “Hold my beer and watch this!’
I refer to the story percolating out over the Fourth of July holiday, over how the fearless newshounds at CNN tracked down the guy (with the nic of Han*ssholeSolo) who appears to have created the GIF of a pro-wrestling Donald Trump slamming an opponent – helpfully labeled CNN – which the president retweeted late last week, to the great amusement of an audience who appreciates unsubtle humor like that. CNN apparently does not appreciate unsubtle humor, especially when directed at them, and forthwith one of their senior editors, one Andrew Kaczynski, tracked down the possible originator of the Trump/CNN wrestling GIF, and demanded an apology from Han*ssholeSolo. Or else they would – in the charming manner which certain pestiferous and malicious trolls display when it comes to tormenting the objects of their ire – doxx him and allow the flying monkeys of the internet lynch mob get their jollies by making his life miserable. And make the lives of his family, his neighbors, employer, and anyone who could possibly be mistaken for him also miserable. The originator, Han*ssholeSolo, may or may not be a fifteen-year-old, and may or may not have had other more or less embarrassing materiel on his page – materiel which if unsavory enough likely gave CNN leverage against him in making demands in the first place.
So – basically, they coerced an abject apology by threatening to turn the white-hot spotlight on him now and in the future if he doesn’t obey orders to the satisfaction of CNN … and then went right out and proudly announced what they had done to the world. This Andrew Kaczynski, I was reminded, was the one chiefly responsible for siccing the flying monkey lynch mob on Justine Sacco, some years ago. That this whole disgusting matter can be construed as extortion doesn’t seem to have occurred to CNN, although it certainly has to just about everyone else.
And it is just possible that the video materiel of Trump and CNN which Trump tweeted may not be the original material created by Han*ssholeSolo anyway, if this story is correct.
Discuss. Practically everyone else is today, anyway.
Here we are, a couple of days past the middle of the year, and almost eight months after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency … and I swear that the lunacy has not died down in the slightest, but is now ratcheted up to eleven, or even twelve. (Gratuitous Spinal Tap reference.) The classical five stages of grief are supposed to be denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, but it’s clear at this point that the Hillary and Bernie partisans are stuck fast at the ‘anger’ stage – and appear to be egging each other into higher, farther, deeper and more intense demonstrations of denial and anger. It’s almost … well, operatic. Like a spectacular ten-car pile-up on the interstate, one can’t even look away from the spectacle – especially the spectacle of establishment news media personalities and institutions losing their freaking minds over Donald Trump.
The reason for this insensate anger is another source of bewilderment for me. I mean – I thought he was one of them, a big-city, big-money and flamboyant-with-it guy, pretty much a moderate Democrat, sort of liberal socially, someone that establishment media figures in New York had palled around socially with for decades. Is it because he is an apostate in their eyes now? Or were they so invested in Hillary, so convinced that she had it in the bag, and that CNNMSNBCBS would carry her over the finish-line, and when it turned out that they couldn’t – this is the tantrum of a very sore loser? Is the media hatred caused frustration over having lost, by excessive and undeniable partisanship, all authoritative credibility with the flyover-country citizens? All that old black political magic that used to work so well – favorable press, celeb endorsements, polling, media appearances, a constant stream of paid political ads, huuge spending – couldn’t get Hillary into the White House, or budge the needle in a Democrat-friendly direction since. I don’t even want to get into the flat-out hatred boiling over on social media and in comment threads in various places, the hatred of liberals for conservatives of just about any stripe.
Is it as a commenter at Samizdata suggested, when one of the regulars there linked to a recent Sarah Hoyt post?
I have often considered that there are a lot more people who have degrees of mental illness out there than we generally realise. Most of the time they can function relatively OK, if surrounded by good people who try and keep them on the path of sanity, however if they are steered in the wrong direction … their inherent bias towards fantasy thinking will mean they go down the wormhole when a more sane person who stop and think ‘Hang on a minute here!’ I think the reason we are seeing more of the misdirection now is the internet – its all there on everyone’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, and 100% accessible to all, whereas in the past such people would probably never have been exposed to such twisted thinking. Now they are, and they lack the critical faculties to determine what is true and what is false.
Discuss, if you can bear it.
(That’s a phrase from the Vietnam War era military, BTW.)
Another day, another mass-killing, inspired by fundamentalist Islam, and perpetuated by a killer prepared to explode himself with a bomb packed with ball-bearings, or nails, chunks of scrap metal, whatever … as long as he or she takes a bunch of infidels with him, thereby to enjoy eternity in the endless whorehouse that is the Islamic version of paradise. Another Bataclan, another Pulse nightclub, another Fort Hood, another San Bernardino, another Boston Marathon. Sometimes the program is varied with guns and plenty of ammunition. But mostly – bombs, calculated to splatter as much human flesh as far as possible. And there is another round of faces of the dead, the bloodied limbs of the injured, splashed over the internet and newspaper pages. Another round of flowers and candles and teddy bears piled up in impromptu memorials, another moment of silence, of services where members of the prominent ruling class assume somber expressions, the inevitable hash-tag and Book of Face filter (where one expresses sympathy and solidarity on the cheap on ones’ page). And the inevitable footnote – where an assortment of media personalities and a selection of plummy-voiced representatives express pious dismay regarding the inevitable anti-Muslim backlash and claim that Islam is a religion of peace. (At this point, I suspect said representatives have their fingers crossed behind their backs, such is the degree of cynicism to which I have sunk since September 11, 2001.) More »
Unaccustomed as I am now, or have any need to casually or professionally involved in the sewer that broadcast television has become in the last decade or two, I still manage to find out about some of the most egregious and offensive violations of good taste, good sense, and good manners, thanks to the internet – like Stephen Colbert’s tasteless and degrading monologue regarding President Trump more than a week ago. There are plenty of viewers and listeners who, like me, are of a conservative-slash-libertarian inclination, and unlike me – do still watch mainstream broadcast news and entertainment. They do take note of these offenses, and post, tweet and comment about them. Since the election of Donald Trump – against all expectations – to the high office of president, an astonishingly large number of public personalities have gone and continue to go stark raving nuts.
People in the entertainment business seem to be worse-affected, although a couple of Democratic Party politicians like Maxine Waters come close. While Maxine Waters’ unhinged blatherings should only be a matter of concern for those fools in her district who repeatedly return her to national office … the equally unhinged blatherings of figures who for some reason have a pulpit in the world of popular entertainment are somewhat more worrisome. Like the aforementioned Colbert, who is alleged to be a comedian. Honestly, I can’t judge whether he is or not a comedian, since I haven’t watched an episode of the Late Show in a dog’s age – but his unsavory blast of commentary which has ruffled feathers in my conservo-libertarian corner of the blogosphere has left the commetariant decidedly unamused.
So – Steven Colbert’s monologue has drawn some comment here and there. No, I don’t think that he will be fired for it; a slap on the wrist from the FCC may be about the most penalty that he will suffer. He is, after all, one of those anointed and set into a place in the high firmament of big media entertainment, an establishment which will roll over and go hard-left, rather than admit that … oh, hey -they have insulted, alienated, and pissed off at least half of their audience, the consumers of their product. Obviously, it must more important to entertainers like Colbert to go along with the popular crowd in demonstrations of contempt for Trump and those who voted for him. Which brings me to the aspect of this which I find to be the most depressing – the motivation for these displays of contempt … no, not only contempt, but outright hatred. The anger and frustration, boiling over. Those of us who voted Trump (often with reluctance and reservation) did not obey the instructions of the elite, and this willful disobedience on our part has maddened them beyond all beyond normal conventions of civility and rational thought. They are choking on their rage and hatred. And so it spills out in a tidal wave like Colbert’s infamous monologue.
Discuss